One of the most colorful stories of New York is the tale of the Coll yer brothers, Homer and Langley, upper-crust snobs, recluses and hoarders, who lived in a trash-filled Harlem mansion, increasingly isolated from the world and dependent on each other, particularly after Homer had a stroke. In 1947 police forced an entrance and found Homer dead. Three weeks later they located Langley’s body. He had apparently activated one of his own booby-traps made of piles of newspapers and died while trying to bring food to Homer.

From their home emerged more than 100 tons of debris, including many pianos and a Model T, in addition to newspapers and rotten furniture. The formerly impressive mansion was so derelict it was ordered demolished. New York firefighters still use the term “Collyer” to refer to a junk-filled apartment.

This true story cries out for fictional treatment. And at least two novels, four plays (one of them in Swedish), a comic book and a short Australian film have been based on them, with aspects of their story contributing to a Stephen King novel and episodes of TV’s “The Honeymooners” and “Frazier.”

Now E.L. Doctorow has added his voice, in “Homer & Langley: A Novel.” Doctorow seems like a natural for this project, as he has a long interest in New York and a talent for combining history and fiction in books like “Ragtime,” “The March” and “The Book of Daniel.”

I have to say that the result is a disappointment. He’s made some changes to jazz up the story and make the Langleys more obvious children of the century: Langley goes off to World War I and is gassed; the parents both die in the 1920 flu epidemic; their Nisei servants are rounded up and imprisoned during the Second World War.

Doctorow’s Collyers live on at least into the 1960s, noting with disapproval the bombing of the Birmingham church in 1965 and even hosting a group of hippies for a while in their home. Homer, who is the younger brother (and the narrator) here, goes blind very early but becomes a fine pianist by feeling a player piano that Langley, the scavenger, brings home for him.

Nothing wrong with this — this is a novel, not a biography. The question is: Has Doctorow used his Collyer history to make a good novel?

One innovation is his making Langley a sort of countercultural prophet, who despairs of human fallibility, spars with the electric and water companies out of some sort of radical individualism (rather than avarice and insanity) and even delivers unlikely pronouncements that seem more Doctorow than Collyer. Such is his declaration that “it is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive.”

But the test of the novel is whether it is interesting, and sadly, it isn’t interesting enough to justify Doctorow’s reuse and re-imagining of the Collyer story.

Maybe it is a fallacy to assume that people this odd must be fascinating. Crazy people can be as dull as the sane. And Homer Collyer, who tells the story, proves to be a pallid and unengaging narrator, occasionally original in his accounts of his compensation for sightlessness, moderately moving in his love for his brother but finally leaving this 200-page novel less gripping than the Wikipedia pages from which my Collyer facts derive.

I recommend them instead.

Merritt Moseley teaches literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.